


Expulsion

by JoAsakura



Series: Arma Dei, Amor Hominis [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Mecha, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-27
Updated: 2016-04-27
Packaged: 2018-06-04 22:11:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6677350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoAsakura/pseuds/JoAsakura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>There were some very weird autocorrect glitches in the text. It's what I get for writing this on my phone orz. Think they're fixed now!!</p></blockquote>





	Expulsion

Dancing on the edge of the mesosphere, scraping the upper atmosphere, and they're bleeding out grace like diamonds.

It mixes with bits of what once had been Dick Roman, King Douchebag Leviathan himself, flaking off the battered surface of Castiel’s carapace, to vanish into the dusty remains of a thousand lost meteors.

The creature is crooning broken static over open channels, whispering how they had been used and abused by God. Made in His Sister’s image when he couldn’t control Her. And cast aside when he couldn’t control _them_.

And Dean couldn’t care less at the moment.

The machine elves can’t keep up with the damage, and with an angel's eyes, Dean watches Dick’s oily black remains floating in a permanent state of disassociation, trapped in the atmospheric sodium layer (just enough meteoric boron  around in it to keep him from reforming, but they’re too tired to flip Dick a well deserved victory obscenity)

He watches it with his own form of disassociation, as they drift a good eighty klicks above Middle-of-Nowhere, Kansas, buffeted by ghost winds and gravity waves, high-altitude electrical displays sparking along their broken wingspan in echo of the storm raging down below in the heartland.

Everything hurts, despite Castiel's embrace. He feels every crack in their skin, every shard of ice coating their joints.  He’s willing to let it go, let everything go, if Cas is willing to as well. They've fought the good fight and this isn’t a bad way to check out, Dean thinks as the maintenance system fights a losing battle to stem the tide. They weren't built to fight God's first children. That was a job for beings greater than they were.

But they'd still won, and it's beautiful up here in this liminal space between heaven and earth.

And he’s so tired. They're both so very tired. Sammy will understand, he thinks, Cas’s faceplate flexing in imitation of the yawn that grips Dean and shudders through the half-conscious Frame.

He’s vaguely humming “Eye of the Tiger” to himself when he feels Castiel snap back to sudden, panicked consciousness, and his comfortable decline suddenly becomes a painful dance of movement as an immediate, wordless terror grips them both, lighting up a fresh new hell of warnings in the corners of their shared vision.

And then he feels it, like bugs under his skin. Some tiny scrap of the leviathan, worming its way into Cas’ hardware, ancient code violating the Frame’s protocols.

  
(SHIT. Up, up, C'mon,  we’ll drag this motherfucker into space. He can’t hurt anyone else if we’re stuck in orbit.) Dean urges but Cas wrenches control away from him so violently, Dean feels his brain bleeding.

And then they’re plummeting, burning off the frozen bits of grace and leviathan shards stuck to their shared skin and Dean is screaming silently at Cas to stop.

And then he understands, and understanding brings absolutely no comfort.

[I can contain this. Pull him into between-space, into Purgatory. He may take me, but I will never let him take you too.] Cas fills the space behind Dean’s eyes with exactly what he plans. And Dean fights him until the last moment, their impact with the wide open fields shaking the earth like a middle american Tunguska.

Dean’s still reeling from the bone-shattering impact as Cas ejects him.. REJECTS him for the first time since he saved one frightened hunter's life, and the separation is nothing like the relatively controlled division they normally experience. In between those beats of absolute agony,  time seems to stop.

Dean's half-blind, naked and freezing in the raging rain, vomiting up breathing liquid and for the first time, he sees Castiel- really, _truly_ sees him in the Real World. Fifteen feet tall and built of shattered pearl and crystal. And Dick Roman is spreading across that opalescent skin like tar, like ink, like an oil slick drowning a swan and there’s a flash of blue from Cas’ visor.

All he hears in the back of his brain is his name like a benediction.

And then a clap of thunder, a blinding flash of light that send him tumbling through the flattened cornfield.

When his vision clears, Castiel is gone.

**Author's Note:**

> There were some very weird autocorrect glitches in the text. It's what I get for writing this on my phone orz. Think they're fixed now!!


End file.
